Thanks for all your input, I'll keep looking for a good laptop, probably will stay with Thinkpads but hate that MS-tax as much as the IRS.So they sell old notebooks with Ubuntu? And an interesting post appeared about notebooks with Windows and Ubuntu: http://www.devside.net/blog/dell-ubuntu-lies
Meanwhile I got the ThinkPad-600 working by grabbing the clock battery from a broken T20, splicing wires from both batteries (connectors do not match), and plugging it in.
I also have two old broken mini-laptops, Thinkpads 240 and 240x, but screens do not match so I just ripped screen side out of one and plugged it in to a monitor, runs fine. Laptops are great but parts are very incompatible. Desktop parts have similar problems although not as bad.